Privacy-preserving targeted advertising scheme for IPTV using the cloud

In this paper, we present a privacy-preserving scheme for targeted advertising via the Internet Protocol TV (IPTV). The scheme uses a communication model involving a collection of viewers/subscribers, a content provider (IPTV), an advertiser, and a cloud server. To provide high quality directed advertising service, the advertiser can utilize not only demographic information of subscribers, but also their watching habits. The latter includes watching history, preferences for IPTV content and watching rate, which are published on the cloud server periodically (e.g. weekly) along with anonymized demographics. Since the published data may leak sensitive information about subscribers, it is safeguarded using cryptographic techniques in addition to the anonymization of demographics. The techniques used by the advertiser, which can be manifested in its queries to the cloud, are considered (trade) secrets and therefore are protected as well. The cloud is oblivious to the published data, the queries of the advertiser as well as its own responses to these queries. Only a legitimate advertiser, endorsed with a so-called {\em trapdoor} by the IPTV, can query the cloud and utilize the query results. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated with experiments, which show that the scheme is suitable for practical usage

Privacy for Targeted Advertising

In the past two decades, targeted online advertising has led to massive data collection, aggregation, and exchange. This infrastructure raises significant privacy concerns. While several prominent theories of data privacy have been proposed over the same period of time, these notions have limited application to advertising ecosystems. Differential privacy, the most robust of them, is inherently inapplicable to queries about particular individuals in the dataset. We therefore formulate a new definition of privacy for accessing private information about unknown individuals identified by some random token. Unlike most current privacy definitions, our\u27s takes probabilistic prior information into account and is intended to reflect the use of aggregated web information for targeted advertising. We explain how our theory captures the natural expectation of privacy in the advertising setting and avoids the limitations of existing alternatives. However, although we can construct artificial databases which satisfy our notion of privacy together with reasonable utility, we do not have evidence that real world databases can be sanitized to preserve reasonable utility. In fact we offer real world evidence that adherence to our notion of privacy almost completely destroys utility. Our results suggest that a significant theoretical advance or a change in infrastructure is needed in order to obtain rigorous privacy guarantees in the digital advertising ecosystem

Privacy protocols

Security protocols enable secure communication over insecure channels. Privacy protocols enable private interactions over secure channels. Security protocols set up secure channels using cryptographic primitives. Privacy protocols set up private channels using secure channels. But just like some security protocols can be broken without breaking the underlying cryptography, some privacy protocols can be broken without breaking the underlying security. Such privacy attacks have been used to leverage e-commerce against targeted advertising from the outset; but their depth and scope became apparent only with the overwhelming advent of influence campaigns in politics. The blurred boundaries between privacy protocols and privacy attacks present a new challenge for protocol analysis. Covert channels turn out to be concealed not only below overt channels, but also above: subversions, and the level-below attacks are supplemented by sublimations and the level-above attacks.Comment: 38 pages, 6 figure

Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Ethics of Marketing Analytics

Abstract The concept of big data has influenced the marketing field in numerous ways. By having access to more information about their consumers than ever before, marketers are presented with a unique opportunity to make the marketing process more streamlined and effective than ever; however, this also creates a challenge in understanding how this targeted advertising affects the brand’s perception by consumers. This study looks at the concepts of data marketing and re-targeted ads from three aspects. First, are marketers being as effective as possible to ensure they are sending the right advertisement, to the right customer, at the right time? Second, are marketers being as efficient as possible when choosing the correct platform to reach their target customers? Third, are companies remembering the ethical components of collecting this information on consumers, and ensuring they understand when consumers feel specialized advertising becomes an invasion of their privacy? To answer these questions, I first performed secondary research in the form of a literature review. From surveying the scope of the subject, I then performed primary research by conducting in-depth interviews and a survey. The results show that there are two distinct type of consumers: one group who is accepting of these re-targeted advertisements and welcoming of the specialized marketing, and a second group who is skeptical of this form of marketing and concerned over privacy issues. Marketers must be aware of these two distinct types of consumers and ensure they are choosing their advertising methods carefully to ensure an efficient utilization of resources and to make sure they are not presenting a detriment to their brand for the consumers who do not want catered advertisements

Online Display Advertising: Targeting and Intrusiveness

We use data from a large-scale field experiment to explore what influences the effectiveness of online advertising. We find that matching an ad to website content and increasing an ad's obtrusiveness independently increase purchase intent. However, in combination, these two strategies are ineffective. Ads that match both website content and are obtrusive do worse at increasing purchase intent than ads that do only one or the other. This failure appears to be related to privacy concerns: the negative effect of combining targeting with obtrusiveness is strongest for people who refuse to give their income and for categories where privacy matters most. Our results suggest a possible explanation for the growing bifurcation in Internet advertising between highly targeted plain text ads and more visually striking but less targeted ads

The Strange Case of Privacy in Equilibrium Models

We study how privacy technologies affect user and advertiser behavior in a simple economic model of targeted advertising. In our model, a consumer first decides whether or not to buy a good, and then an advertiser chooses an advertisement to show the consumer. The consumer's value for the good is correlated with her type, which determines which ad the advertiser would prefer to show to her---and hence, the advertiser would like to use information about the consumer's purchase decision to target the ad that he shows. In our model, the advertiser is given only a differentially private signal about the consumer's behavior---which can range from no signal at all to a perfect signal, as we vary the differential privacy parameter. This allows us to study equilibrium behavior as a function of the level of privacy provided to the consumer. We show that this behavior can be highly counter-intuitive, and that the effect of adding privacy in equilibrium can be completely different from what we would expect if we ignored equilibrium incentives. Specifically, we show that increasing the level of privacy can actually increase the amount of information about the consumer's type contained in the signal the advertiser receives, lead to decreased utility for the consumer, and increased profit for the advertiser, and that generally these quantities can be non-monotonic and even discontinuous in the privacy level of the signal

Asking for It: Gendered Dimensions of Surveillance Capitalism

Advertising and privacy were once seen as mutually antagonistic. In the 1950s and 1960s, Americans went to court to fight for their right to be free from the invasion of privacy presented by unwanted advertising, but a strange realignment took place in the 1970s. Radical feminists were among those who were extremely concerned about the collection and computerization of personal data—they worried about private enterprise getting a hold of that data and using it to target women—but liberal feminists went in a different direction, making friends with advertising because they saw it as strategically valuable. Liberal feminists argued that in the context of reproductive rights, advertising and privacy belonged on the same team. A woman’s right to self-determination in the realm of reproduction, constitutionally protected by the right to privacy, would be undercut by any restriction of advertising related to reproductive products and services, they argued. Liberal feminists fought for the right to be targeted by advertising, which they said contained valuable information. This strategy, I argue, invited the vampire of what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” in. By the 1980s, companies were bombarding new mothers with coupons, ads, and baby formula samples before they had even left the maternity ward. Photography companies paid for access to maternity wards, where photographers would snap photos of newborns, then ask new mothers who might still be heavily medicated for their credit card information in exchange for prints. Disney started sending its salespeople into hospital rooms. Today, women faced with the far more formidable threats posed by Big Data lack a meaningful cultural or legal context for pushing back, and they are suffering as a result. Many neoliberal feminists still think more representative or more inclusive advertising is worth fighting for. I argue that we yet have much to learn from the radical feminists who believed that we have a privacy right to be free from the intrusions of advertising altogether. For feminists to limit themselves to fighting for an equal right to be exploited by asymmetries of information would be to replicate the tactical errors of previous generations of women who believed that targeted advertising would be crucial to their liberation. To resist capitalism today means pushing back against the idea that privacy is obsolete and insisting that algorithmic intelligence and consciousness are not continuous